Ready to use ESXi VM (ova template)

Napp-in-One
offers the most options and flexibility. Download ESXi 6.5 free without RAM-Limit from vmware.com (ESXi is a ultra lightweight
Hypervisor - think about as a Super Deluxe Bios extension where you
can run supported operating systems like BSD, OSX, Linux, Solaris or
Windows side by side, each with best performance). You should own a
modern mainboard with passthrough support (vt-d) to virtualize your
NAS/SAN with similar performance like a barebone setup or you can try a
physical RDM (Raw Disk Mapping) setup.

Install the free ESXi edition. enble pass-through support in your mainboard bios and
in ESXI. Download the zipped and preconfigured VM, unzip it and upload
the VM folder via ESXi filebrowser to a local ESXi datastore. Import
the VM in ESXi 6.5 in menu Virtual machines > create/register or in older ESXi via its filebrowser and a rightclick on the .vmx file within the folder. Add your
SAS controller as a pci device via pass-through to your OmniOS SAN VM
and boot it up. It is ready to run with 5.1/5.5 vmware tools, two nics
(e1000 and vmxnet3 in dhcp mode) and root pw unset. Run ifconfig at
console to get current ip and manage via browser and http://ip:81.

In
a larger ESXi environment, you can use several Napp-In-Ones where each
ESXi use its own local highspeed ZFS SAN. No single point of failure and
no SAN bottleneck. You can use Napp-In-One datastores locally or
remotely and you can use combined VMmotion and storagemotion to move to
another machine.

A lot of ESXi users keep their VM's on a dedicated shared SAN
storage server. For high performance, low latency and reliability a
redundant FC or IP network is used to connect them together with a
second SAN storage server for redundancy with Clustering/ High
Availabilty. But quite often, you do not need such a complex and
expensive high-end solution. You only want shared storage with
Highend-SAN features and high performance and low latency between ESXi
and storage. Your ESXi servers are not working to capacity. You have
enough CPU and especially RAM left for another VM.

This is where
Napp-In-One can be the solution. Napp-In-One means, integrate the two
functions ESXi server and ZFS NAS/SAN storage server into one box and
connect them in Software. You can reach quite the same performance like
with two dedicated servers (same RAM on storage server) connected via
highend 10 GBe networks. Usually you keep all VM's on their 'lokal' SAN
storage. Each Napp-In-One works completely independent from others (SAN
is no longer s single point of failure) while you have all options like
flexible storage allocation, boot a VM from another SAN, move, clone and
backup between your SAN's. If you have enough disk bays free in
your Napp-In-One (highly recommended) you can even move a pool
physically in case of problems or wanted updates to another Napp-In-One,
import the pool and start the VM's there or from there. To move VMs you
need a combined Vmotion + storagemotion.